Got the game and really enjoying learning what works vs what. But one thing that is frustrating me is how to keep my fighters from wasting their attacks on other fighters. Essentially I have designed a ‘torpedo bomber’ which carries 2 Fighter Torps. Because of the long reload time, I dont want my strike fighters to waste them on enemy fighters while I’m flying to engage the enemy ships. But nothing I’ve found so far keeps them from firing at the fighters and ‘wasting’ their shots.
From what the manual says, if I delete ‘Fighters’ from the targeting list, in theory this should do the trick. But they still waste their shots on the fighters as soon as they get within range. Is this something I’m missing or is it a bug or is there some other way to prevent this behavior from the fighters?
Not sure if it would work as I never tried it, But try to use max range on the class you want to hit and move the other slider to 100%. If that does not work then there is no way to do it.
all ships fire at targets in their range, even if that ship isn’t on the priority list. By deleting fighters, you effectively set it to a 0% PRIORITY. They’ll still shoot
OK, thanks for the replies, guys. I guess it makes those dedicated ‘strike fighters’ a whole lot less useful than I had hoped. Well, back to the drawing board!
Send out your strike fighters at the fighters, Put your bombers in escort of a weak weak frigate and send it right into a cruisers line of fire. Once that frig goes down the fighter bombers are unleashed Try it that way.
Physical separation is the only way to keep your torpedo bombers from attacking enemy fighters with their first shot. And even if you start them well away from enemy fighters those fighters may seek yours out (if in attack mode), or at least provide the first target anyway (if they are escorting your target ships).
If you include some fast rocket or laser fighters in an anti-fighter mode, they may keep enemy fighters off your back long enough to enable your torpedo planes to get in close for one salvo, but the slow speed and slow reload rate of fighters carrying torpedoes makes them extremely problematic as an offensive weapon, with low survivability (they are easy to hit) and low firepower (the torpedo looks nice on paper, but its greater damage factor is effectively negated by the slow rate of fire). Laser fighters ordered to get in under an enemy’s shields will generally last longer and be much more effective.
As entropy said, even if you manage to get your torpedo fighters to hit their inteded target, they are so slow that they die quickly and don’t do significant damage. Laser fighters eat unarmoured cruisers for breakfast.
No, we haven’t. Fighter torps are mostly pure fail - and just for the reasons you mentioned. They’re a pathetically underpowered weapon - a virtual guarantee that the fighter struggling to drag the massive torp around will be slaughtered with ease…usually well before they reach the target. It’s a shame, as they’re a weapon that I really wanted to like.
Torpedo fighters can kinda work, sometimes. They need to be held back until any enemy ships capable of slaughtering them before they can attack have either been destroyed, or are too busy attacking something else that is higher priority. This means you need to kill most of the more sensibly-designed enemy fighters and engage the main body of the enemy fleet with cruisers and so on. At that point, a swarm of torpedo bombers can do some serious damage.
I have only tried this in the campaign, where end-game fleets can afford some fat. Even so, it is not at all cost-effective, since the rest of your fleet is basically holding the enemy down so the torpedo fighters can kick them. In other words, it only works (at least in my limited experience) if you were probably going to win anyway, without the torpedoes. Also, sometimes the enemy fleet does something unexpected, the torpedoes go in prematurely, and get wiped out without accomplishing much of anything except spreading debris around. It’s really fun to watch, though, when they do work.
Of course torpedoes work against defenseless targets. But every weapon on the laser lineup can hit slow fighters. The big red laser will probably hit two on the first wave, all the punchy little rapid guns will hit them like crazy even without tractor beams.
I can’t seem to get anyone to ignore anything, even if I delete the order completely. I’ve had an entire fleet of cruiser plasmas beaten by a single frigate and a single fighter, all because I couldn’t get the cruisers to NOT focus the fighter.
But one thing that is frustrating me is how to keep my fighters from wasting their attacks on other fighters. Essentially I have designed a ‘torpedo bomber’ which carries 2 Fighter Torps. Because of the long reload time, I dont want my strike fighters to waste them on enemy fighters while I’m flying to engage the enemy ships. But nothing I’ve found so far keeps them from firing at the fighters and ‘wasting’ their shots.